Thursday, February 19, 2009

Now on Selling Out or Not

Back on January 7 I wrote a post specifically about Feist but more generally about the outdated notion of "selling out". Selling out is still definitely possible, but it's about the integrity of your work - not about who signs the cheques. In an age when fewer and fewer people are buying music recording artists need to find other ways of paying the bills and advertisements generally do more for the artist than the do for the advertiser. The artist gets a big, fat paycheque and greater exposure for their music. This is important since neither MTV nor Much Music are really about music anymore.

I'm happy to report that others are beginning to see the light as well. There is an excellent little piece by Benjamin Boles in Now today that you should give a read.

"The mantra of the pro-filesharing scene has long been that musicians who are pissed off about not being able to sell albums should just refocus their attention on making their living off of tours. What they forget is that tours can be very expensive for larger bands especially, which is one of the reasons why we’ve seen this explosion of duos and one-man-bands in recent years. Taking a 10 person band on tour is prohibitively expensive for all but the biggest acts, but you can stick a duo in a tiny sub-compact and hit the road with very little overhead. "

Who you are doing ads for is also somewhat important - is it a product you use? is it a product you would let your kids use? Beyond that it's just a paycheque. Take the money and run.